


someone is waiting to swallow all the halos out of you

by Birdbitch



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Related, Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Mission, Spies & Secret Agents, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:00:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23438095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Birdbitch/pseuds/Birdbitch
Summary: Bucky's well-trained in a lot of things, but field medicine really isn't one. Steve is well-trained in coping mechanisms and sidekick-soothing.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 3
Kudos: 28





	someone is waiting to swallow all the halos out of you

**Author's Note:**

> Playing around; ages are pulled from the comics-verse (or one of them): Steve was born 1922, Bucky 1925. The youngest of the regular Commandos is Morita, who's still three years older than Steve. The Invaders accompany. Sometimes you sit down to write something porny, get distracted by about three hours of reviewing research on counterintelligence agencies during WWII that you already knew. 
> 
> Title comes from "Someone Is Waiting" by Neutral Milk Hotel.  
> Was thinking about the relationship between Winters & Nixon as portrayed in HBO's "Band of Brothers."  
> -We'll go to Chicago. I'll take you there. 
> 
> Stressful times both ways. Enjoy.

Steve didn’t say anything when he brought the water back to the tent, just dipped the corner of a towel in it before crouching in front of Bucky and wiping the red off his face. “You did good today,” he murmured, though Bucky squinted his eyes shut and gave his head a little bit of a shake. 

“Superman does good,” he answered. 

“Saved some lives, mine included.” 

The blood was a smear, something Bucky hadn’t noticed he’d done when he’d wiped his face with the back of his hand. “Sure. Sure, Cap.” 

A list of what Bucky was good at: French, (some) Italian, (passable) German, (garbled) Russian, sharpshooting from a distance, hand-to-hand, killing (too good), first aid (triaging), getting kidnapped (too often), tricking the kidnappers (never, Steve thought, worth the risk, not because of the military intel that Bucky kept locked in his brain but because—well, selfish reasons), gymnastics, dancing. Not singing. As far as the war effort was concerned, Bucky was an irreplaceable asset because of these facts, because he was good at them without needing a multi-thousand dollar science experiment to make him into something that they could use. As far as Steve was concerned, Bucky was irreplaceable because—he was. 

“We’re not—miracle workers,” Steve said, finally, dropping the towel in favor of pressing his palm against Bucky’s face. “You tried.” 

Steve had thought in the crossfire that it had been Bucky who’d been shot, there’d been so much blood on him. He didn’t know the man who’d died, just that Bucky had been trying to stop the bleeding, that it had been someone who Bucky knew at least in passing in the mess, and that the kid had seemed even younger than the two of them, though they’d both been doing this since they were teenagers, now, and had become young men. It probably would have been easy, considering that, for Bucky to brush him off, but like the other times before, when Bucky had gotten the same glassy look in his eyes, instead he leaned forward and closed his eyes again. “He was scared,” Bucky said. “He’d been so scared, and I was scared, too.” 

The shakiness of him when they were finally able to pull back, when the Commandos had finished the final seizure and blown a hole through the roof of the building the sniper had been firing from, had proven that much. Steve’d kept a hand on his shoulder the whole trip, while Bucky stared back at the rubble, at the men who weren’t moving on with them. “You’re not a surgeon, Buck. You’re not even a medic,” Steve said, trying to keep his voice firm, because what he’d found was that this was what Bucky needed from him, as much as he needed Bucky to make wisecracks and press pilfered chocolate bars into his hand whenever he got them. 

It took a moment before it started, but when big, fat tears started coming out of Bucky’s eyes, Steve was a little relieved. Nothing so broken in him that these couldn’t still happen. He waited a moment for the inevitable, for when Bucky would let out a stifled sob and then push forward, wrap his arms around Steve’s shoulders and weep into his neck. Ironically, maybe, the crying was evidence to Steve that Bucky would be alright when they went back out there, like it was some kind of proof which worked to show that Bucky was still human, and still felt the wrongness of war enough to know it, and weep for it, and weep for what it took. Steve cried, too, but he’d gotten too used to crying quietly, never prone to the big emotional tears that Bucky took on suddenly and then were gone almost as soon as they came on, as though the act of crying itself was the ritual required for processing. Steve wondered in the back of his mind who would be better off in the long run, but war had already given so many of their peers permission to be tender in a way that they never could in the world outside of war, the world that required them to become soldiers like this in the first place. 

“Steve,” Bucky said against his neck. “The only person I have to go back to is my sister, and I don’t even think she remembers me. I keep thinking about this poor dead kid’s mother.”

Some of those Germans, likely, had mothers too, Steve thought, and felt the kind of guilt that would usually come to him in waves whenever he remembered that there were people on the other side of this, but which he was able to push away long enough to get the job done. Bucky got comfortable where he was, clung on even as Steve pushed him further back on his cot. He only pulled back a little, nose and eyes red like someone had rubbed watered-down gouache over the high points on his face, and it was to give Steve an appraising look. “Christ, Cap. You must have thought it was me.” 

“Something like that,” he answered, and Bucky tugged him closer, urged him to lay down with him, side-by-side. Bucky had changed, at least, from the bloody uniform into the olive drab, even though he’d missed cleaning his face when he’d washed up, and Steve was in process himself. “Something about being orphans is supposed to make it easier for us.” 

“Maybe that’s why they recruited us, huh?” Nobody to raise a stink when they didn’t come home. They’d had this conversation in some variation before. 

“I think it’s more to do with the fact that they couldn’t arrest a major’s son for selling contraband.”

“You do a pretty good job remembering my origin story.” 

“You faked not knowing who I was,” Steve chided gently. “You’re a good actor, though.” Another thing to add to the list.

“It was genuine surprise on my face there,” Bucky answered, and closed his eyes. “Captain America, undressing in my tent?”

“Sure. Sure. Didn’t you just get some distinction for your intelligence field work?”

“You mean for the night swim?” Bucky snorted, let his fingers play over the back of Steve’s collar. “I never get scared about these things until it’s too late to matter. You know, I’m lucky it wasn’t a full moon.” He paused for a moment before cracking an eye open. “Would your ma have let you become a science experiment?”

“She always wanted me to do the right thing.”

“Hm.”

“Plus, I don’t know if she could have stopped me.”

“No more than you can stop me, I figure.”

“I stop you just fine. No, I don’t think she would have been happy about it, even if I had been older when it happened.” He remembers being nineteen and sick and adamant, and then terrified that they still wouldn’t take him because what if he died while they shot him full of the serum? Well. Not that, he’s realized, it would have mattered all that much to the army if he had died, after all, but at the time—he wonders if it was as much a duty thing as it was him needing to prove something, to someone, even if it was just to himself. His mother would have been furious with him, as a matter of fact, but she would have understood, at least. 

Bucky’s hands had stopped moving, and Steve realized that he was still holding onto him, maybe longer than he should have. “There was this other kid I was with, before I knew you or even Toro, you know,” he said, voice soft. Distant. Steve was about to lose him to the glassy eyes again. 

“Lehigh?”

“No, an SOE guy. I guess he wasn’t a kid, since he was a little older than both of us.”

“What happened?”

“What happens to any of them?” 

“Buck.” Steve swallowed, let his hand travel a little down Bucky’s side. “Buck. You know, you’ve got me.” 

“I feel like this is all I’ve ever known,” he whispered. 

Maybe that was true, and was why it had been so easy for Bucky to become the trained killer that he was before he’d even hit sixteen, because Bucky had undergone training before Steve had even been transformed, changed. “We’ll go to New York. I could take you there.” 

“I guess then Captain America would always be getting undressed in my tent, huh?” There’s a sniffle, and the threat of more tears, but they don’t come. “You’re not immortal either, Steve.”

“I’ve known that for a while,” he answers. Bucky still looks like he’s not there, not all the way. “Buck. I’ve got you, too.”

“You sure I’m what you want?” Life back in his cheeks, not quite ready to joke, but there enough to sigh when Steve’s hands pushed their way under the uniform top to stroke the skin there. 

Steve wanted to cry out, because Bucky was just about all that he’d ever wanted. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re it.” Presumptive thing to say, but they could die any minute, being where they were when they were, and how frequently had they both thought about that? Steve  _ had _ been shot before, had almost died, would have if it wasn’t for Bucky, if it wasn’t for the serum turning everything about him into human, but more, the quicker healing, the resistance to sickness. “Ah, Buck.”

Bucky’s hands had moved again, now to the front of Steve’s shirt, plucking open the buttons as casually as if they were his own and he were getting ready to jump into a river and start swimming. “Yeah, Steve?” he asked, and he looked at Steve, who couldn’t do much more than just pat Bucky’s side like a child learning how to pet a cat for the first time. 

He thought about bringing it up, about how when he’d thought he was dying, he’d mostly been disappointed with himself, and then sad about how Bucky would have inevitably felt about it, but instead he changed his mind. "Was thinking about the first time we did this," he said, and Bucky raised an eyebrow. "You looked like the cat who caught the canary but all I could think was how I was the one who lucked out." His nightmare, that time: sometimes you rescue a guy you thought was just a little brother to you, and through the whole mission the only thing you can think about is how devastated you'll be if you're too late, because there's no one else, not for you, not like this. Bucky had been strapped to a table less like interrogation, more like torture for the sake of doing it. "I worked myself up thinking I'd never get to…"

"You know Rogers, I didn't realize that I was involved with such an enormous sap," Bucky said, swinging his thigh over Steve's hip. "I guess it's kind of nice, though. That you remember that that well." 

"Never forget it."

"Eidetic memory. Right. Must give you plenty of masturbatory material, you fuckin’ reprobate." Bucky rolled his eyes. "Steve, I like you."

“Like you too, Buck.” 

The smile got a little bit more firm on Bucky’s face. 

A list of other things Bucky was good at: kissing (deeply), getting Steve close enough to a state of undress before he could even realize what was happening, sighing, whispering really dirty things into Steve’s ear (the kind that could get them in trouble), using his hands. 

And, Steve thought, a list of what he was good at himself: pulling the sighs out of Bucky, holding onto him tightly enough to see the skin go taut and white but not so tight that there’d be marks after, getting Bucky’s eyes to roll back in his head, maybe also kissing (though, Bucky was better at that), pressing just right with his hips, easing Bucky open with soft words and gentle nudging. 

He moved down to kiss Bucky’s thighs, swallowed him while Bucky’s fingers kept digging into his scalp, and he sighed against the muscle, against the spaces where the hair was sparser, where Bucky could feel it more, and then moved back up. “Buck, Buck,” he whispered, and Bucky whined against him and tugged him back into a kiss like he wanted to taste himself in Steve’s mouth, and could. Steve felt like he could say “I love you,” but kept it stuck between his teeth with his bottom lip instead, fitting himself between Bucky’s thighs and pressing them down, closer to the sides of Bucky’s bruised chest (were they ever not bruised and aching in some capacity? No), trying to get as close to him as physically possible, and then some, spiritually.

Even though Steve had no doubt that this was real, he also wasn’t so naive to think that there wasn’t, when they did this after ops, a sense for either of them that this was a distraction. Or affirmation. Steve liked the way that even though Bucky had slimmed since training (hard not to), there was still give to him, a tiny part of his midsection rolling up when his body curved inward. Bucky needled him, but Steve refused to rush. He’d thought that Bucky might be dying, after all. He had no idea how long they had, or how many times they’d have to do this. And it was, probably, the same for Bucky, because he cried again, arms wrapped around Steve’s neck, reassuring him that no, no, keep going,  _ I’m fine _ , but Steve, “I don’t want to die,” whispered, after the dirty words, in a sad little voice that reminded him of that time—the rescue mission—all over again.

Steve kept holding him, and said, “I don’t want you to die, either,” which was, he realized as soon as he said it, a very dangerous thing to say or even admit to oneself when the possibility of it happening was so, so real. He ran his hand over Bucky’s flank again, kissed his forehead. Or if not dangerous, then probably pretty stupid. It would hurt so much more if it happened now that he’d said anything, though he already knew that it was bound to probably kill him. 

“I think we’re in the wrong business,” Bucky mumbled into Steve’s throat. “I should have stuck with sneaking things into the camp.”

“Maybe,” Steve answered. If he had the choice again though, he knew he wouldn’t have done anything any differently; even aside from the new body, there remained the fact that being Captain America had led him to meeting Bucky. Give that up? Not a chance. There was also the fact that Steve felt like he was actually useful, being in the army, something even as an artist for the WPA he hadn’t really thought of as being true, and for all the ethical issues he could probably find if he looked at the situation deeply enough (sometimes it felt like they had given him a brand new brain, too), he was sure that there was at least some good he was doing. There had to be.

“You know,” Bucky said some time later, while they were still lying there, some unprecedented amount of peace and quiet without being called immediately back for a briefing or debriefing or some other need. “I had a crush on you.”It made Steve bark out a laugh that he quickly bit down on, though Bucky still gave him a push. “It’s true! I was a kid, pretty much, knew all this stuff but had dropped out of school, trained in elite espionage and psyop and all this other work to be—a weapon—and I actually had gotten it into my head that all this training had some how made me less babyish—”

“You still had a baby face.”

“Shut it! I thought that I was so mature—and then Peggy Carter shows me a picture of the guy I’m supposed to pretend is also a regular, untrained corporal, and he’s—he’s  _ you _ , and I go totally goo-goo eyed and realize maybe I’m not so enlightened as I thought I was.” 

“I’m wondering why they decided to make the biggest blabbermouth in the entire continental United States an intelligence officer at the age of sixteen.”

“Because my father filled out my birth certificate wrong and they thought I was eighteen. You jerk.” 

“I’m sure meeting me only ruined everything for you,” Steve said, grinning, enjoying the flush that came across Bucky’s face.

“You made things so much worse,” Bucky answered, hiding behind his forearm. “I couldn’t stand it. Charles Atlas and nice to boot? You’re terrible. I hate you.”

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said gently, pulling his arm down. “Charles Atlas was a self-made man. I have a whole team of scientists to thank.”

Instead of making him laugh, it made Bucky cry. “Steve. Steve. Nothing can happen to you. I think that’d be worse than anything happening to me.” 

Steve vehemently disagreed, but said nothing, and waited until Bucky finally felt like he could sit up again, and followed his lead. “For what it’s worth, Buck,” Steve said, “I think we’re in the same boat.” Quietly, they got dressed again, and when Steve put his palm flat on the top of Bucky’s head, Bucky pressed up into it, and Steve was thankful for it, even though he dropped his hand to his shoulder as they went to join the Commandos and Invaders. He watched when Bucky pulled away from his side to join Toro, the two of them forming their own strange cohort while Steve, despite being closer to them than to someone like Namor, was still pulled for cards in that other direction. He still kept his eyes on Bucky over Dum Dum’s shoulder, who caught his gaze, casually turned to look, and then looked back at his cards and chuckled. 

“Careful there, Cap. I heard OSS trains their agents to strangle men with their thighs.”

“What a way to go though,” Steve murmured. 

“Cap chasing skirt?” Morita asked, not looking up.

“Something like that,” he answered. 

“I always forget how young you are, Steve,” Gabe said. Then, “I fold.” 

“Older than the Torch here,” Steve said, nudging Jim, who laughed about as well as an android could, given the circumstances, and Steve reconsidered his hand and didn’t like it, but figured he could probably bluff through his obvious distraction.

Gabe laughed, too, and shrugged his shoulders. “A lot of life left ahead of you, though,” he said. “Might as well chase ‘em while you can, right?”

“Might be tempting the gods to talk about how much life we have or don’t have left in front of us,” Dernier said, and the mood grew too somber for a moment before he made a crack about more beautiful women spies and how yes, wonderful, it would be if they were the ones who were killing them, not Nazis or HYDRA or Italian Fascists or any of the others they often found themselves fighting. Steve looked up in time to catch Bucky staring at him, and could feel his own cheeks go red when Bucky winked at him before returning to whatever it was that he and Toro were doing. 

He thought about the red splotch on Bucky’s face again, though, and closed his eyes, feigned a yawn to hide the grimace that came through. It wasn’t Bucky’s blood, but it could have been. It could have been.

**Author's Note:**

> The long(er) fic is still in progress; goal is to finish by the summer. (We'll see.) I know we're all in hard times, but I'll still ask: send me a ko-fi? https://ko-fi.com/A8005O7  
> On Tumblr @ Sailorbirdie.
> 
> Be well.


End file.
